On the first landing he stopped again, dropping the butt of his cigarette on the stair carpet and treading on it with his heel. Bloody Quirke and his stuck-up bitch of a daughter. He had thought all that business with April was over and done with, but now here it was again, rising up and bursting like a big soft bubble, giving off a horrible and all too familiar stench.

Ned Gallagher’s secretary informed him that Mr Gallagher was in a meeting.

‘Is he, now,’ Latimer said, in a menacing purr. ‘Miss O’Reilly phoned you not ten minutes ago and you told her he’d be here.’

‘The meeting ran over.’

He looked at her, grinding his jaws. She was the image of the dried-up spinster in his own office – they were all out of the same mould.

‘Tell him the Minister needs to see him now,’ he said. ‘Whoever he’s meeting can hang on a few minutes.’

The secretary hesitated, but he did that thing with his eyes, letting them go cold and dead, that frightened all underlings, especially of the female variety. The woman tightened her mouth and picked up the phone and said something into it in a voice too low for him to hear, and hung up.

‘Mr Gallagher will be with you in a moment.’

‘Go raibh maith agut,’ he said, not that she merited thanks.

Her display of resentment had amused him. Yes, they were all the same. Two things in particular they had in common. They were hopelessly in love with their bosses, and ever on the lookout for slights. He paced the floor in front of her desk, knowing it would annoy her. She bent over her typewriter, poking a pencil into its innards. He whistled a tune thinly between his teeth and batted his hat against his leg.

The door behind the secretary’s desk opened and a little pale-faced man in a pinstriped suit came out, with Ned Gallagher behind him.

‘Good luck, now, Francis my lad,’ Gallagher said briskly to the little man, putting a hand on his shoulder and propelling him forward. ‘We’ll renew our discussions another time.’

The little man cast an anxious glance in the Minister’s direction, nodded to the secretary, and was gone.

‘Bloody old woman, that fellow,’ Gallagher said to no one in particular, making a face at the door through which the little man had made his getaway. Then he turned to the  Minister, extending his hand. ‘Bill, how are you, and what can I do you for today?’ The Minister did not return the greeting, only gave a curt nod. He didn’t care to be addressed in so familiar a fashion by a civil servant, and certainly not in front of a secretary. ‘Isn’t the weather a tonic?’ Gallagher went on blandly.

The Minister grunted.

They went into Gallagher’s office, and Gallagher shut the door behind them.

Chapter 29